Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

While I like C++, it really needs a good standardized framework. Especially in areas such as threading, network I/O and GUI programming.

I have been using Qt for a while but I find it foreign in some places and could do with better integration with the language. I would for one like them to drop MOC and move to templates. The need for legacy compilers these days are no longer important as most of the framework does not support it anyway.